By BristolBound

*This BDSM fantasy is a work of fiction.  All characters are adults*

*This story must be read in order, starting from Chapter 1 of the original series “Season”*

Chapter 5: Victory Lap

I wore a beanie on Monday.

It was a navy bobble hat, pulled down to the top of my eyes, and I looked like a man in witness protection. It made no difference. A bald head and no eyebrows are not features you can hide under a hat. They’re a general atmosphere, and by ten past nine I had been asked four separate times if I was all right.

The lecturer was the worst. Dr Hollis taught supply chains in a gentle, rumpled way and had never once raised his voice, and when I came in late and sat at the back, he stopped mid-slide, and looked at me for a very long moment, and then, with enormous tact, waited until the room had emptied.

“Eric,” he said, “I just wanted to say that if you’re going through something, anything at all, the university has very good support. You wouldn’t have to say what. I’d simply sign the form.”

It took me a full three seconds to understand. He thought I was ill. He thought I’d lost my hair and my eyebrows to some horrible treatment and come in anyway, and he was being so kind about it that I wanted to lie down in the lecture theatre and let the floor have me.

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s, um. It’s a hockey thing.”

“A hockey thing.”

“A bet. I lost a bet.”

Dr Hollis looked at my face for rather a long time. Then he nodded slowly, having decided, as a matter of policy, not to ask, and said, “Of course. Well. The offer stands,” and I fled.

The padlock lad had waited for me outside. “Oh my God,” he said. “Your eyebrows. And your… Is that the same bet?”

“It escalated.”

“What was it about?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, and for the first time in my life I felt something close to sympathy for the goat.

At training that night, the team treated me like a returning hero. They also treated me like a lost-property box. Jonno ran his hand over my head and said “Smooth,” with real reverence, and Dev took a black eyeliner pencil from his bag and drew me a pair of eyebrows, with great concentration, while I sat on the bench with my eyes closed and my cock twitching in my shorts. “There,” he said, standing back. “Very distinguished.” It was only when I looked in the mirror that I understood he’d done them at different heights, so I looked permanently astonished and slightly suspicious. Tom reached for his phone, remembered something, and put it away again, looking noble. Callum came in, looked at me, and said nothing at all, and after training, in the car park, he put his thumb to the left one and rubbed it clean off.

“Leave it bare,” he said. “I like you honest.”

That was all. I went home and lay on my bed with the collar warm at my throat and the whole of the day going round and round, the pity, the pencil, the thumb, and I took hold of myself and came in about four seconds, like a beginner.

The cage wasn’t in the way. It had come off on the Friday, in my front room, with some ceremony, and gone into Wills’s sandwich Tupperware. I only mention it in case you’re wondering.

There were two more by Wednesday night. Callum’s text arrived on Thursday morning, as if he’d been counting: That’s the last one before Sunday. You know what I mean. I typed Was that a question? and he sent back a single full stop.

The next text came on Friday.

Sunday. Students’ Union, 11. Rag Week parade. You’re the mascot.

What parade? You said that last week.

Everything’s booked for this Sunday.

Cal, WHAT parade?

He sent a thumbs-up. Callum has never sent a thumbs-up in his life.

It was a flatbed lorry. That’s what it was.

It was the Rag Week float, the big rattling truck with a scaffold frame and a few thousand yards of bunting, and it had been spray-painted with the hockey club crest in black and gold. A banner across the front said BUCS CHAMPIONS! FIRST TIME EVER! In the middle of the flatbed, a bit above the heads of the team, a small wooden stage had been built, and above that stage, from the scaffold, hung a pair of leather wrist cuffs on short chains.

I looked at them. Rag week, hockey, lost a bet: it turned out I’d been telling the truth by the bins all along.

“We thought,” said Callum, “that we’d go all out.”

“Callum.”

“We thought the whole town ought to see what the team’s built on.”

“Callum.”

He took my chin, gently, and tipped my face up to look at him. It was a cold, bright morning, and the sun on his hair made him look very young.

“Here’s the plan. You’re in a hood, so nobody can recognise you. You’re in latex, so nobody sees more than they should. You’re in a cup, so nobody sees anything at all.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Nobody touches you. They’ll think it’s a rag stunt, which, to be clear, it is, there’s a collecting bucket. The whole team’s going to be around you the entire time.” His voice dropped. “And it’s up to you. If you don’t want to, you say it. Sunderland. We’ll go home and have a pizza and call it a day. Nobody will think anything of it.”

I looked at the truck. I looked at the cuffs. I looked at the stage.

The whole town. The thought did the thing it always did, started low in my belly and rose through me, hot and bright and bottomless. The whole town, looking at me, and nobody knowing it was me.

Except they would. In a way. We would.

“Are those locked?” I said, nodding at the cuffs.

“They will be.”

“Who’s got the key?”

Callum showed me, on a chain round his neck, beside the little brass key to the collar I was still wearing.

“Okay,” I said.

I’d already shaved that morning, neck down, in my own bathroom, to a standing order from Raj: new blade, fresh foam, every last bit of stubble gone, because latex, he said, grips hair and takes it with it on the way off. Callum sat on the edge of the bath and watched and did nothing else at all. It took twenty minutes. I have never been so carefully observed doing something so ordinary.

They coated me in the back of the van.

Raj started with questions. “Any reaction to latex? Gloves, balloons, condoms?” “No.” “To any of them?” “No.” “Good. I had to ask. People are surprisingly casual about it.” He did a patch test on the inside of my elbow, a single neat brushstroke, and made me wait ten minutes. The smell hit first: sharp and ammoniacal, and underneath it the sweet, rubbery smell that was somehow worse, because it was a smell I already knew from other rooms.

“Skin-safe,” said Raj, peering at the patch. “No redness. And you’re a very good surface. Very smooth. If you hadn’t been shaved I’d have had to suggest something else, and that would have been a different Sunday.” He cleared his throat. “Nothing on your face, nothing above the collar, and I’ve left gaps in the plan. Latex doesn’t let you cool down. If you feel hot, or dizzy, or tingly, you say so, and I mean *say so*. I’ll be on the truck, with water.”

Tom and Jonno did the work with brushes, kneeling either side of me while I stood in the middle of the van in nothing but the collar, my arms held out like a scarecrow. It was cold and wet and it went on in long, sleek, slightly sticky strokes, down my chest and ribs and the backs of my thighs, and each coat pulled at my skin as it dried, like a hundred small hands drawing me tight. Dev worked a hairdryer between coats and supervised. Gold across the chest in the shape of the crest. Black down the arms and the legs. A big gold number 1 across my stomach, with a flourish. By the third coat I could hear it: a small creak whenever I breathed.

“You’ve missed a bit,” said Dev.

“Where?”

“Here.” He pointed, with great seriousness, at the base of my cock. “It’s a bit… pale.”

“I’ll do it,” said Tom, with tremendous gravity, and did, quickly, in about four strokes, while I went crimson and Wills looked out of the window.

Then the cup.

It was mine: my match jock from the bottom of my kit bag, the same one I’d ridden home in after Durham, with the hard shell slotted into the pouch. Matt had softened the rim with a strip of foam, and he fitted it himself, a flush climbing his neck, with a lot of “Sorry, sorry.” It closed over me like a very polite hand. Under it I was hot and tender and pressed flat, with nowhere to go. I’d been out of the cage for nine days, hands off since Wednesday, and I now understood that this was the point.

Tom brushed the straps and waistband black, as neatly as if he were wrapping a present, until the jock disappeared into the rest of me. Then, after a short debate, he gave the cup a coat of gold.

“There,” said Callum. And then he took the hood.

It was a new one, plain and black, not Matt’s, laced, tight. But this time it had a wide, open mouth hole, so I could breathe, and so I could shout, if I needed to.

That was the first time I realised I hadn’t got a gag.

“No gag?”

“It’s a parade,” said Callum. “We’d like to hear you if you scream.”

“Is that a joke?”

“A bit.”

I climbed onto the stage on my own two feet. I stood where they pointed. And Jonno and Dev took my wrists, one each side, and raised them up above my head, and I felt my own cuffs close round them, snug, familiar, a comfortable, creaking old friend, and then the chains taken up a link at a time on the scaffold, and a small padlock at each wrist. Tick. Tick. My arms were drawn up, and out, and held, and I rose slightly onto my toes, and my chest stretched, and the cold air went over my slick, gleaming ribs.

I was naked, apart from a jockstrap, a collar, a hood, and a great deal of black and gold latex.

“Remember what you can see,” Callum said, from beside me, quite softly, “for just a second.”

I looked out through the eye holes, which they had, this time, left open, at the whole of the Students’ Union forecourt. A crowd. Hundreds of students, in fancy dress, with flasks and banners. A bloke in a bumblebee costume. A man with a drum. And the team, all of them, standing on the truck in their blazers, a ring of faces. Smiling. Looking up.

Then Callum slid a soft padded visor into the hood, over my eyes, and the world went out.

The engine started.

I don’t know how to tell you about it.

The truck moved. We went slowly, down Northumberland Street, round Grey’s Monument, up Grainger Street, past all the shops, and I heard the whole of Newcastle come out to look at us. A roar. A rolling, drumming, glorious roar, in waves, of people cheering and shouting and honking, and the thump of a brass band somewhere ahead. I stood at the top of it all, in the cold, in the wind, with my arms chained up and my body gleaming and bare, and I heard them laughing.

“What’s he for?” said a voice, quite close, as we passed.

“He’s the mascot,” said another. “It’s for charity.”

“Why’s he in that?”

“Because it’s rag, mate.”

I heard the laugh. A great, warm, happy, innocent laugh, and a bucket rattling, and coins clinking into it, and a wolf-whistle, and a man shouting, “Nice cup!” and someone else, lightly, “Is he allowed to be that cold?” and Callum’s voice, from the side of the truck, cheerful and bland: “He’s fine, he’s a hockey player.”

I should have been mortified. I was mortified, in some old part of me that still keeps accounts. But beneath that, in the great deep calm that had been growing in me for weeks, there was something quieter. And bigger. It was the feeling, I think, of being seen, and held, and known, by a thousand people who had no idea who I was, and by twelve who did.

The latex held me. The chains held me. The team held me.

Somewhere past the Monument, a gust of wind took a flurry of confetti and put it in the mouth of my hood. The sun came out. The whole city went gold.

Callum slid up beside me on the stage. I felt him take my hand, up in the chain, and squeeze it, once. His mouth was at the hood, by my ear.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said. And then, because it was true, and because I could, “I’m brilliant.”

“We’ll let you down at the Quayside. Hot chocolate. A blanket. Pizza.” A pause. “You were incredible, Eric.”

“I was in a hood.”

“You were incredible in a hood.”

I laughed. I could feel the sun on my shoulders, and the roar of the crowd, and a tiny flutter of confetti on the crown of the hood. I was stuck, in the middle of the road, in front of the whole town, locked up, in the dark, hard and aching and pressed flat inside my own jock, and I had never in my life felt freer.

“Cal,” I said.

“Mm?”

“I want a say in future.”

He was quiet.

“A bigger one,” I said. “I’m going to write you a list.”

I could hear him smiling.

“Captain’s decision,” said Callum. “But make it a long one.”

And the truck turned the corner, and the whole bright, deafening city roared.

They took me down at the Quayside, off the truck and into the back of the van, and Callum laid a blanket over my shoulders the moment the hood came off. Hot chocolate. A pizza box, open on the floor. The sun on the river, and the roar of the day still ringing in my ears.

The latex came off last. Raj started at my wrist, with a fingernail and a cotton bud of soapy water, and drew back an edge. “Slowly,” he said. “It’s a sunburn in reverse.” It peeled in one long, crackling sheet, black and gold on the outside, dull and damp underneath, and where it lifted, my skin was pink and cool and shockingly bare. Tom held the first strip up to the light. “Ten out of ten,” he said. Callum took it from him and, without a word, folded it small and put it in his pocket.

The club held a presentation night in the back room of the Free Trade the Thursday after, with the cup on the bar, a banner Tom had painted himself, and a free pint for every man in the squad from a sponsor who hadn’t read the small print. I wore the collar, obviously. Nobody blinked.

The lads had been fiercely, unspokenly good about one thing all week. People kept asking how we’d won the cup. Other clubs, other captains, one very persistent man from the *Chronicle*. Every time, someone said “good coaching” or “great captain” or “luck” or “Wills,” and changed the subject, and nobody ever looked at me. That was the whole of it. Nobody ever looked at me. Twelve men had a secret, and the secret was me, and they kept it better than they’d ever kept a clean sheet.

The man from the *Chronicle* was in the back room, naturally. He had a lanyard and a notebook, and he had already written the headline; he was waiting for the facts to catch up. He waited until Callum was at the bar, and Wills was being photographed with the cup, and everyone else was busy being loud, and then he found me by the fruit machine.

“Eric, isn’t it? *Chronicle*. Two minutes.” He didn’t wait to be told he could have them. “You were in the squad all season, weren’t you? And then you’re dropped for the cup run, and the team go on and win it. How do you feel about that?”

I opened my mouth.

*Dropped* was one word for it. *Chained spread-eagle between changing-room walls with my cock in the air* was another, and I was fairly sure it wasn’t the one he was after.

“It’s, um. It was a—”

“Because it must sting,” said the man from the *Chronicle*, warmly, writing. “Missing out on the matches that actually matter. Is there a problem with the captain? A rift? Because some people would say—”

I didn’t see Jonno move.

One moment the man was in my face. The next there was a large forearm across the front of his lanyard and he was a full step further back than he’d meant to be, with his shoulders against the wall. Jonno, who had once spent twenty minutes in the Greggs queue arguing about the price of a sausage roll, who laughed at everything and had never, in my experience, been anything but a golden retriever with a hockey stick, was looking down at him with no expression at all. Behind them the fruit machine played its little tune.

“Eric,” said Jonno, very quietly, “was a key member of the squad, alright. We couldn’t have done it without him.”

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “Have you got everything you need, mate?”

The man looked at the forearm. He looked at Jonno’s face. Then, because he was a journalist and couldn’t help himself, his eyes slid past Jonno’s shoulder to me, and down, to my throat.

“And the collar? Is that a padl—”

“Team thing,” said Jonno. “He earned it.”

The man seemed to make a quick and sensible calculation.

“Great quote,” he said. “Cheers.”

“Pint’s on the bar,” said Jonno. “Take two.”

He took two. Jonno watched him go, and then turned back to me and was, instantly, a golden retriever again. “You alright? You’ve gone a funny colour.”

“That was—”

“Didn’t mean a word of it,” said Jonno cheerfully, and picked up his pint. “Well. I meant all of it.”

I said it to myself all the way home. *Key member of the squad.* When I got in, I sat down at my desk, turned over a lecture handout, and wrote YES across the top of the blank side.

Then I sat and looked at it for a long time.

* * *

The list ran to three pages.

I wrote the rest of it over the winter, in pen, with the sort of care I usually reserve for dissertation proposals. It had headings. It had a column for Yes, a column for Maybe and a column for Absolutely Not, Don’t Even Think About It, which Raj had read through with a red biro and described as “refreshingly thorough” and “a bit worrying in places, but I’ll allow it.”

I handed it to Callum in the car park behind the sports hall, the last day of the spring term, with the whole squad pretending not to watch from the minibus.

He read it standing up, in the drizzle, slowly, the way he does everything that matters. He turned the first page. His eyebrows went up at something. Turned the second. The corner of his mouth went. By the third, he’d gone very still.

“Item fourteen,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You want us to decide the order.”

“I want you to decide everything on the Yes list. I’ve put what I’m up for. I’d like not to know when, or what comes first, or how long.” I shrugged, in what I hoped was a casual way. “That’s the bit I like. Not knowing.”

“And the Maybe column?”

“Ask me at the time.”

He folded the pages in half and put them in the inside pocket of his jacket, over his heart, like a man pocketing a cheque.

“There’s one more thing,” he said. “We’ve got a tour. Valencia. Five days. Matches, obviously, but the club’s got a villa with a very large, very empty cellar.” He paused, and the smile arrived, slow and certain. “Matt’s had a busy winter.”

“How busy?”

“Raj has had to sit him down and explain the word ‘proportionate.’”

I laughed, but it came out a bit higher than I’d meant. Callum heard it. Of course he did.

“Cal.”

“Yeah?”

“I said I wanted a say.”

“I know.” He took a step closer and put his hand on the back of my neck, warm and steady, the way he did at my flat. “And you’ve had it. Three pages of it. I’ve never been so well briefed. Most of the Yes list is going to happen, Eric, just not in the order you think.”

“That’s the point.”

“I know it’s the point.” He squeezed once. “Get on the bus.”

I got on the bus.

My club jacket had a badge on the lapel. It was small, round and yellow, the sort of thing you get for putting a pound in a tin, and it said I RECYCLE in black capitals, ringed with little looping green arrows. The lads had presented it to me on presentation night in the Free Trade, with a speech from Dev, a toast, and a round of applause that went on slightly too long. I had pinned it on myself, in front of all of them, with a face like a warm brick. Since then three strangers had congratulated me on my commitment to the environment, and Dr Hollis had shaken my hand. Nobody got the joke except the squad, and every time one of them caught sight of it, they had to look out of the window.

I’m not going to explain it. It’s theirs.

Tom had saved me the seat at the back, and he looked up as I sat down, delighted. “Hey, Eric. Do you know what’s under your seat?”

“Kit.”

“Yeah.” He beamed. “Kit.”

Jonno turned round in the seat in front, kneeling up on it, grinning. “Big kit.”

“The biggest kit,” said Dev.

I looked out of the window, at the grey car park and the wet pitches and the club crest on the side of the pavilion, and I felt my pulse start to climb. Somewhere under my seat, in a locked box I hadn’t noticed when I sat down, something heavy shifted and chinked.

Callum climbed in last and sat across the aisle. He didn’t look at me. He just put one hand in his pocket, and I heard a very small, very familiar sound, the tick of a padlock, closing on nothing.

I was already hard.

“Good boy,” said Callum, to the window, and the bus pulled out.